Song of Sappho
My love for you is a ship without sails,
knowing no harbor, sailing from nowhere to nowhere,
a game lost cleanly, a Greek tragedy on the sand of the amphitheater, where you were the only one alive among dead decorations.
My love is Sappho’s elegies, strings, a storyteller of valleys and sorrows. About how in this absolute world of evil the silence is stronger than the cry of dry grass,
and no poison is more deadly, than an arrow flying into the void.
ANZHELINA POLONSKAYA
Translated by Andrew Wachtel
